The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

by DC Pierson

  “She’s pretty,” Eric says.

  “You mean that Navajo mom?” I say.

  “Oh yeah, her. Just hook me up with whoever you think Tits would like.”

  When the food shows up, Eric makes it further into his Delicious Dozen than I do into mine. He drinks coffee before I would necessarily deem it a drinkable temperature. When the bill comes, I pay it, and think about how it’s fine because it’s all money I had allotted in my mind to paying my brother for whatever chemical solution to Eric’s thing we were going to try. So I am paying for this meal with money I saved by getting free roofies. Eric is not the weirdest thing in my life, I think. I am.

  Outside IHOP, on the sidewalk, Eric insists he’s totally walking-capable.

  “Are you sure?”

  Eric nods, and it seems like a sober and collected nod. So I let him walk to the bus under his own power.

  “It seems unfair that the hash browns are counted as one item in the Delicious Dozen,” Eric says. “They’re called ‘browns.’ Plural. As in, multiple items. So they should count each brown. Are browns the unit of hash browns?”

  Then he falls hard to the pavement.

  6

  “I thought about asking Tony DiAvalo to draw something on my cast.”

  It’s a little dramatic to call it a cast. It’s more like, I don’t know, an arm brace. I’ve seen girls on the soccer team wear them. Eric’s arm is just sprained. Some joints are sort of messed up but nothing’s broken. He has some minor cuts and abrasions on his face where he hit the street. It actually looks like he gave a pretty good account of himself in a really cool fight.

  “I know I said it already, but I am really sorry.”

  “I thought I could walk,” Eric says. “It really felt like I could.”

  “You were pretty insistent.”

  “My mom hates you. I’ve been over at your house a ton and she gets called to the emergency room. So that’s the great loss here, all the esteem my mom had for you previously.”

  “Did she?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Anyway. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. But can we put a moratorium on testing my limits?”

  I say I guess we probably should.

  This electric hum starts. Then the sound of a chain grinding against something. For the first time since Eric and I started sitting here at lunch, the loading dock door is sliding open. The light that’s bright as hell out here at lunchtime even in late November spills into what’s behind the door, which I guess is whatever’s behind the auditorium.

  The door finishes opening and the hum stops. Then this other sound starts, wheels on concrete and rumbling. All these big wooden slabs start rolling out on wheels, a bunch of girls pushing them. Some of the girls look like Cecelia and her friends, bigger girls with spiked belts and black T-shirts and hair they might’ve colored with highlighters. A girl who doesn’t look like Cecelia and her friends, with black hair up in those kind of braids you might see at the Renaissance Fair, a girl who I’m 95 percent sure is the girl from IHOP, catches me looking at her chest. But mostly the girls look straight ahead, navigating these huge rolling pieces of wood that remind me of sailboats for some reason except instead of sails they have plywood sticking straight up, painted all over with a big-city skyline, some parts of which are more accurate, perspective-wise, than others.

  “Goodbye, Guys and Dolls!” says a fat kid standing in the open loading dock door. He waves at the big wheeled cityscapes.

  “Hey, Gary,” says one of the girls, “why don’t you, like, help, instead of like standing there?”

  “Uhm, I DID help!” the kid, Gary I guess, says. “I’m just a little emotional right now, ’kay?” He has a high voice and a little bit of a Southern accent and a T-shirt that says IF YOU CAN’T RUN WITH THE BIG DOGS, GET OFF THE PORCH.

  Drama kids. There are band kids and drama kids and the amorphous weird kids, free-floating nerds like Eric and me. There are other camps that could be called nerds but they’re, like, the Anime Club and the Chess Club and they experience a lot of crossover with the drama kids and the band kids. You see the band kids practicing in the morning on the field where Eric and I staged our imaginary biologically modified troop invasion and I guess if you went to football games you would see them performing at half-time. But the drama kids you never see. You might have one or two in some of your classes and never know it until they stand up at the end of class and remind everybody that they have one of their plays this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night. And they only have like two a year so you rarely get that reminder. The auditorium and adjoining classroom and whatever else is in that wing of the school is pretty much all theirs, their own little enclave where they could be doing any number of things, like sacrificing goats, but probably they just sing loudly to each other.

  The big wheeled cityscapes pause right in front of Eric and me. The one girl and Gary keep bitching at each other. The girl whose chest I got caught looking at who I’m approaching 97 percent sure is the girl from IHOP comes over to us.

  “Hey guys,” she says, “we’re gonna be painting out here for a while. It’s spray paint so it could get kind of messy. Just, like, fair warning.”

  “Lunch is over in a minute,” Eric says. Aren’t you guys going to have to paint kind of fast?”

  “We get to skip sixth period,” she says, “once every couple of weeks to help out with set-painting stuff. Our drama director made it so we can write it up as, like, volunteering.”

  Sixth period I have advanced chemistry, which is an exercise in torture because despite how much of Eric’s and my stuff centers around biological modification and rips in time and the human genome perverted by radioactive ghosts, I’m terrible at actual nuts-and-bolts science. It’s the only class I have that is neither easy nor something I’m good at. Eric has health, which he hates because it’s easy. We’re different people but we both have sixth periods that suck.

  “Can we help?” Eric asks.

  “Uhm … sure!” the girl says, looking pretty skeptically at Eric’s arm brace, maybe wondering how much help he’ll actually be.

  “I’m Eric,” Eric says, “and this is Darren.”

  “Hi, Eric. Hi, Darren. I’m Christine.”

  “Hi, Christine,” Eric says. I’m not sure I want to be around these people or help paint and this is my only clean pair of jeans and if I get paint on them I’ll have paint on my jeans for the rest of the week and it’ll be a tell-tale sign that I wear the same jeans every day.

  Christine looks at me. I don’t know who I think I’m impressing and no one looks at my jeans anyway and fuck if I want to sit across from my lab partner today and have him look at me like I’m an idiot because I just don’t understand valence electrons. I get up off the ground.

  “Hi, Christine,” I say.

  “Guys, this is Eric and Darren,” Christine says to her crew of girls in black hoodies and studded belts. We meet Marisa, Ashley, Claire, and another Ashley. They are nice and it doesn’t seem fake. We meet Gary, who rolls his eyes at us.

  Another guy, Ryan, comes out of the loading dock with some spray cans and some newspapers. He has big fuck-off boots and a newsboy cap and a white wifebeater. We spread the newspaper all around the rolling platforms. Pretty soon Ryan is placing his boots on the faces of bad local columnists in the pictures next to their bylines as we shake up the spray cans and cover the cityscapes in gray. The girls throw around gossip featuring the names of people we don’t know.

  “It’s the cast party,” one Ashley says, “it’s for the CAST. What did she expect?”

  “Kyle was being, like, the anti-Kyle on Saturday night,” another Ashley says.

  “Alisha has a lesbian switch she can like turn on and off,” Marisa says.

  “What is this for?” Eric asks about the platforms.

  “A play,” Gary says, like we’re idiots for asking, like every tenth-grader knows that the first step in the process of making a play is to spray-paint some
wood with wheels on it.

  “Didn’t you guys just do a play?” Eric asks. Some of the Day-Glo-orange flyers are still blowing around in the parking lot.

  “Yes,” says Marisa, and sighs so you can hear it.

  All the girls get really quiet. The wind that’s blowing the flyers around kicks up even more and with their hair blowing around they seem like war widows or something because they all start sighing.

  “Guys and Dolls,” one Ashley says. “The first ever fall musical in the school’s history.”

  “There will never be another show that good. I guarantee it,” Marisa says.

  “Never,” agrees another Ashley.

  “It was miraculous,” Claire says. “Everything came together.”

  Eric and I look at Ryan for some sort of masculine confirmation or denial.

  Ryan shrugs. “It was pretty fuckin’ good.”

  “I don’t know how we’re going to top it,” Gary says, “especially with some … experiment.”

  “It’s not an experiment,” Christine says, “it’s an experimental theater piece.”

  “Oh, right, THAT,” Gary says.

  Christine explains: “We do two shows every year. A play and a musical. Usually the musical’s in spring and we spend the rest of our budget on it. This year our theater director Mr. Hendershaw did the musical in the fall so that way we’d have money left over and we could do a third play, after Christmas break. It’s something he wrote himself. It’s going to be amazing. He’s a genius.”

  The other girls and Gary look away and keep painting. Ryan has gone to get his iPod out of his truck.

  “It doesn’t seem like anybody else agrees with you, necessarily,” Eric says. I kind of want to hit him. I only ever deal with him when it’s just us, for the most part, so I forget what an awkward dude he is around people.

  “I don’t know,” Christine says.

  “It’s just…” Marisa says, “three PLAYS? I mean, it’s never been done before, much less, like, something that’s never been seen before. I dunno, it seems … controversial.”

  “EXACTLY, controversial, exactly,” Christine says. “I’m not saying Guys and Dolls wasn’t great, it’s just, you know, nobody walked out of there going ‘Wow, that changed the way I view the world,’ you know?”

  “It was supposed to do that?” one of the Ashleys says.

  “No. I don’t know. But we’re artists, right? Shouldn’t we ALWAYS want to do that?”

  “I just like dancing,” the other Ashley says.

  “Mr. Hendershaw’s piece has dance aspects,” Christine says.

  “Christine has suck-up aspects,” Gary says.

  Christine glares at Gary. What Christine has told us are called “flats” are now drying, completely gray, and the lunch bell hasn’t even rung yet. Ryan pulls his truck up to the loading dock, leaves the driver’s side door open, and blasts us all with ska music, the kind that, because of how bouncy it is, I can’t imagine anyone but Muppets listening to.

  “Ugh,” Christine says to me. “I hate this.”

  “Yeah, right?” I say. We are standing in the gravel watching paint dry.

  “What kind of music do you like?” Christine says.

  “I dunno. A lot of stuff. You probably haven’t heard a lot of it.”

  “Try me,” Christine says.

  “Uhm … okay … Styles Replay, Overlee, Manboy, Church Cancels Cow …”

  “I LOVE Church Cancels Cow. Aren’t they amazing?”

  “They are,” I say. “They are amazing.” This isn’t even the shit that my brother likes that I’ve picked up on, or the music Eric and I have decided would be good for the movies. This is the stuff I really actually like, not the things I like publicly.

  “And Manboy … Oh my God. I haven’t heard … what was it?”

  “Styles Replay? Overlee?”

  “Overlee.”

  “They’re great,” I say. “I’ll burn you their albums,” I say before I know I’m saying it.

  “That would be great. Some of the people who were seniors when I was a freshman in Theater Division that are in college now, we still keep in touch. And they’ve got pretty good taste, but it’s not enough,” Christine says. “I’m so tired of ska and pop-punk and musicals, musicals, musicals.”

  “Me too,” I say, even though I couldn’t name four musicals if you paid me. My dad listens to jazz and classic rock and my brother listens to Christian scream-o and crack rap and country to be ironic and Eric listens to everything, one thing at a time, and I don’t think he’s anywhere near the genre of musicals yet.

  “This is a weird question,” Christine says. “Were you at IHOP really late on Friday night?”

  “Yeah,” I say, “that was us.”

  “I thought so!” Christine said. “We went there Friday after the show. Well, some of us. The musical has tons of people in it so we didn’t want to—that was a whole other dramatic situation. Just once I want to go for French toast without being accused of elitism, you know?”

  “Sure. When we were there Eric accused me of elitism like four different times.”

  Christine laughs and the wind blows hard in our direction.

  “Well, there are lots of really fascinating sides to the abortion issue,” Eric is saying to Claire and an Ashley.

  “No. No. I’m sorry. No, we can’t even discuss this,” Claire says. I have no idea how they got on the subject of abortion.

  The lunch bell rings.

  “Looks like we’re done. With this part anyway. Thanks for the help,” Christine says.

  “Oh, uhm, you’re welcome. Should we still stay for sixth period, or…”

  “Okay, well, let’s think of this from God’s point of view,” Eric says. “Just theoretically.”

  “NO. NO. NO,” Claire says.

  “That’s not very rational, and that’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Eric says.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t,” Christine says. “You guys, I mean. I mean … I don’t know if our director would be able to get you approved, and …”

  “Right,” I say. “Eric, we should go.”

  “But we get to stay through sixth period!” Eric says. “Legally! Right?”

  I shake my head.

  “Oh.”

  Eric goes to start packing up his lunch, now hyperconscious of maybe being late to sixth period, even if it is just health. I go to grab my backpack.

  “I’ll see you around, I guess. For that CD and whatever.”

  “Hey!” Christine says. “We’re having this party this weekend. If you want to give it to me there.”

  “Uhm. Okay.” Are you inviting me to a party, I want to say. But I realize that would be a stupid thing to say to someone who was actually inviting you to a party.

  “Are you on Namespot? I can just message you the details.”

  “Uhm. Yeah. Yeah, I’m on Namespot.”

  “Awesome! I’ll do it as soon as I get home.”

  “Okay,” I say, knowing I should walk away, heading for my backpack as quickly as I can because if I don’t I might screw it up somehow.

  “Bye!” Christine says.

  “Bye,” I say, and look back so I don’t seem completely subnormal, and to make sure the thing that I think just invited me to a party is a girl and not a trick of the light or swamp gas or a bunch of Drama Club flyers whipped around by the wind into a girl-shaped cyclone. It is, in fact, a girl, and she’s waving and cute.

  Eric is waiting around the corner, I think because he got the hint that if he stayed any longer one of our new drama friends was going to slap him.

  “What did that girl say to you?” Eric says.

  Most of the gossip you hear in school anymore is not about things that happened at school or even in people’s bedrooms but things that happened on Namespot where it’s impossible to detect sarcasm and girls nearly rip each others’ eyes out over being bumped out of their friends’ “Top Tags,” and Eric and I have sworn never to join the cult, we would hon
estly rather have our brains eaten by spiders, as per Eric’s worst-way-to-die.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  I need to get to a computer.

  I duck into the library. My sixth-period lab partner is just going to have to wait five or ten minutes to look at me like I’m stupid.

  I grab a computer in a study carrel over by the dusty “Young Adult Fiction” section. I type “namespot.com” into the browser: It loads, thank God. Sometimes sites that are for purposes of entertainment are blocked by the school’s firewall, but the librarians probably aren’t the quickest trend-seekers and Namespot is something like the eighth social-networking site kids our age have adopted and then abandoned in the time I’ve been in high school.

  As soon as the page loads I feel like a complete sellout: The front page is covered in banner ads for truly awful skate-punk bands and, look, I can enter a contest to be an extra in a sequel to a movie about a hard-luck inner-city dance gang. I hit JOIN.

  I enter my real name. One of the million things that make Namespot obnoxious is the tendency people have to make their profile names cute or weird or off, like instead of Deandra, a girl might be DEANDRACAN’TWAIT4THAWEEKEND! Or a dude, instead of Chris, might be BMX_IZ_4_FAGS. I won’t do that and plus how is Christine supposed to find me if I do? I guess people do it to prevent “stalking,” which is a big preoccupation everybody seems to have, but nobody’s going to stalk me. People just wish they were stalked. Given the option, they’d stalk themselves.

  At first I start coasting through profile blanks, entering not much if anything at all for likes, dislikes, influences. (Influences on what? My Namespot profile?) But then I realize I want her to think I didn’t just whip this profile up so she could invite me to a drama party, it has to look lived in, used. But what the fuck do you say?

  For bands, I put the three bands I talked to her about, but then I think, no, that looks odd. I only like three bands? So I intersperse them with some other things, a band or two I’ve heard my brother mention, and some things my dad likes, like The Band, and some things I remember Eric rattling off when he was talking about his industrial phase. Then I look back at what I have and I think, This is weird, does this look like I’m too eclectic? Does this look like I’m joking? Then I think maybe Christine’s got Namespot on her phone, maybe she’s in class looking for me right now, and the thought simultaneously excites me and freaks me the fuck out: I have to finish this. For books I put a couple sci-fi authors, old ones, old enough to sound either cool or obscure, and throw Salinger in there for good measure. Movies: Fight Club, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Sin City. Not my favorite movies, my brothers’, but mine sound too nerdy (the sacred texts like Star Wars, the original trilogy, and Lord of the Rings, and beyond that to be honest with you my favorite movies are theoretical ones that haven’t been made yet and I think only people like me and Eric would make. You see how I can’t write that). I leave relationship status blank: not desperate, not anything, an enigma. Yeah.